Was Nagasaki the greater U.S. sin?

Great Debates
161

If I were you, I wouldn’t want to have this discussion with me either. I reject your diatribe that everyone who participated in WWII were assholes. It’s a simple realization that Nagasaki was the result of Imperial Japan’s invasion of China and their intended conquest of Asia. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Japan to stop the atrocities. The British had deployed Force Z naval squadron to deter Japanese expansion into British possessions. Imperial Japan responded by bombing Pearl Harbor, attacking Malaya, Singapore, French Indochina, and the Philippines and sinking the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse.

Diplomacy had obviously failed. Now it was left up to soldiers and sailors to end Imperial Japanese expansion and atrocities.

In the 1930’s, the U.S. voters didn’t want any part of another bloody war in bloodthirsty Europe. Most didn’t even know where Japan and China were. In 1939, the entire U.S. military was approximately the size of the BEF and French troops rescued at Dunkirk in 1940, 360,000. In 1940, Congress authorized increasing the number of military personel to 500,000 and commissioned more war ships. While most of the British Commonwealth were well schooled and prepared to fight a “world war”, the U.S. was woefully unprepared to fight a major war on one front, nevermind two fronts.

Hitler was so delighted that the U.S. would be at war with Japan that he celebrated by also declaring war on the U.S.. The U.S. was now pulled into wars in two different theaters.

After Darwin and Singapore, Australia realized that they could also be invaded/embargoed by the Imperial military and the AIF (One In - All In) were still fighting in Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic, PM Curtin requested aid from England (Can we have our own troops and ships back?). PM Churchill made it clear that Australia would be on it’s own until the issues with the Nazi were under control. PM Curtin then requested assistance from the U.S. on 27 December 1942, when Curtin said, “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

The first offensive ground assult by the U.S. occured on Guadalcanal. 1,000 miles from Australia and only 6,000 miles from San Diego. Which country, in YOUR opinion, was the primary beneficiary of landing Marines on Guadalcanal? The monumental assholes in the USA or the monumental assholes in Australia?

162

You keep bringing up this false dichotomy. It’s still false. It’s not an either/or proposition, if (stop Axis) then (condone atrocities=true). I can absolutely be grateful the Nazis and Imperial Japan were fought and stopped, while decrying the ways in which they were fought and stopped.

[QUOTE=DrDeth]
You are absolutely wrong and this is whitewash coming from the other side, the stuff the Japanese have been spreading: “Oh the Americans forced us into attacking them!” :rolleyes: “Oh, The Americans also had excesses, so our are not so bad.”:rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]

Nonsense. Did I write anywhere that the crimes committed by the Japanese were “not so bad” ? That Japanese conquest was in any way justified ?
I’m running out of ways to explain this to you. “The lesser evil” is still, in point of fact, evil - and as such, more evil than “the not evil”. Even if it’s less evil than “the greater evil”.

163

No, since the two "evils’ (and I can argue that the Allies missteps weren’t really “evil” but “wrong”) are so widely disparate they aren’t comparable.

It’s like taking a serial killer/rapist who has raped, killed and tortured dozens of children, and comparing him to a guy that got in a drunken brawl in a bar. “They both committed violent felonies, didn’t they?” :dubious:

164

Dude, you’re the one who’s apparently so intent on comparing the two.
Flashback: the whole argument was started by Dissonance’s wondering whether gassing Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima would have been much worse than firebombing civilians in Tokyo, morally speaking. To which I replied “not really, but…yeah”. Queue your bringing up Unit 731 and whatever the fuck.

165

Not a student of the submarine campaign?

The U.S. 3rd/5th fleet ranged up and down the coast of Honshu, blasting the crap outta anything and everything they could reach throughout most of '45. (Tokyo itself bombed by aircraft of the 5th fleet on 16 February 1945)

http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Compac45.html

That’s includes battleship bombardments of the coastal areas.

I don’t agree with your speculation.

166

On reflection, I think we did the right thing.

167

Quote:
Originally Posted by doorhinge
Diplomacy had obviously failed. Now it was left up to soldiers and sailors to end Imperial Japanese expansion and atrocities.

??? What or which part do you consider false? That diplomacy failed or that it was up to the combatants to end the war? The diplomats weren’t even talking and the Imperial Japanese were, in fact, invading countries and butchering surrendered civilians and military personel.

Where is the either/or position required for a false dichotomy?

168

The part where you offer this as a counter-argument for “You seem to believe that doing horrible things to horrible people is, in fact, not horrible. Let’s just say we strongly disagree on this […]”.

Where have I mentioned diplomacy ? Have you seen me deny a justified need for military involvement ?
Since I haven’t, I can’t but conclude that to you, the various atrocities committed by Allied forces (i.e. those “horrible things done to horrible people”) which I condemn were part and parcel of “ending Japanese expansion”, or that the latter couldn’t have been accomplished without the former if you prefer.

169

(I’m sorry, I goofed in post #164, that was Gray Ghost, not **Dissonance **doing the wondering)

170

“I” mentioned diplomacy. I even quoted myself when I posted -

Quote:
Originally Posted by doorhinge
Diplomacy had obviously failed.

FYI - Your conclusions are your conclusions and have no bearing on my posts.

The events leading up to WWII were varied. The Axis certainly had more time to plan and to build up their military. While the Allies certainly expect some kind of aggression, they were clearly caught unprepared for what actually happened. Nazi Germany, England, the U.S., Russia, and Japan had started programs to build a nuclear bomb. The U.S. completed their program first.

If any of the other countries had managed to built an atomic bomb, they would have used it. If Nazi Germany, or Russia, or Imperial Japan were the first to build a working nuclear bomb, they would have used them to take control of the world. It’s obvious that the U.S. did not want to rule the world because there was nothing in 1945 that could have prevented them from doing so if they so desired.

12 million men under arms, thousands of ships and tens of thousands of aircraft, plus an unlimited supply of Fat Boys.

Lucky thing for the “world”, eh.

171

Indeed. What did it have to do with *anything *anyone had said prior ?

172

If I were President, I’d nuke Japan every other Wednesday, just to keep them on their toes.

173

??? Did you want to mention Allied POW camps in Germany, again? How were those camps associated with the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki?

“I” mentioned “diplomacy” which caused you to deny that you mentioned “diplomacy”. That made absolutely no sense to me but it’s an internet posting and I realize people are busy with real world stuff and I could always ask a question if I wanted a clarification.

174

They weren’t.
But then again, those were only mentioned as a partial counter to your bringing up the mistreatment of POWs by the Japanese among other things, presumably as a means of establishing a moral high ground for the Allies in general (something no one had really disputed but that in this specific case *really *wasn’t so high, so much so that I felt compelled to retort).
Which, admittedly, had nothing whatsoever to do with what you were responding to at the time (which is to say, the comparative moral assessment of gassing soldiers vs. firebombing entire cities).

And then you went into further non sequiturs - I cannot claim to have been able to follow the gist of your argument from that point on, particularly since you rebutted what inference I could draw from it. Hence my question.

175

Sorry, I’d missed your comment.

Not really - I know bits and pieces of it and a lot of miscellaneous trivia about it, having played a lot of Silent Hunter, and I did know that the Silent Service accounted for a hell of a lot of tonnage sunk.
I just assumed they concentrated on the fat Maru supply shipping to and from Japan (as opposed to the fishing fleet, crummy little sampans etc…). I also knew that the disruption of shipping had a huge impact on the feeding of their troops scattered all over the place, but also sort of assumed that Japan proper was more or less self-sufficient in terms of food, between the fishing and the rice paddies.

Well, all right then. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument and as a hypothetical, that I could have been wrong on the “day or two” bit… :slight_smile:

176

No, it should be done monthly, so we can all chuckle about how they’d pronounce it as “monthry”.

177

I didn’t directly answer this question the first time around.

Unequivocally not.

We know a fair amount about the actions and thoughts of the eight key players (the Emperor, the Big Six members of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, and Lord Privy Seal Kōichi Kido) over the final days. This is from interviews, the war trials, as well diary entries and a great deal of other research.

During the deliberations, the army was first refusing to agree that Hiroshima had been an atomic bomb, and then at least one of the members of the Supreme Council was arguing that the US could only have had one. From the continued resistance by the hardliners in the meetings after Hiroshima and the declaration of way by the USSR and even still after Nagasaki, it is easily shown how much was actually required for Japan to actually surrender.

This is completely wrong. By this stage of the war, the US had broken not only the military codes but also the diplomatic codes and was intercepting and coding messages faster than the intended recipients. We knew what they were attempting to negotiate through the Soviets. There could not have been a conditional surrender which would have been acceptable to both the US and the Japanese hardliners.

The Japanese militants would not have accepted a conditional surrender which would have removed them from power and the Allies could not allow them to stay.

As others say, this is hopelessly naive. The hardliners in the military were prepared to sacrifice every man, woman and child in order to preserve the Japanese nation as they saw it.

In the meantime, they had plans to kill all of the Allied POWs (several hundred thousand), and there would have been hundreds of thousands or millions more deaths of civilians in Japanese occupied counties as well as however many Japanese civilians would have died from starvation.

Japan was unique among nations in that it was dependent on ocean transport of a significant amount of its internally produced food. The bulk of the rice is harvested in northern Honshu, Hokkaido and Kyushu. By the summer of 1945, the US had understood the lessons of fact finding from the defeated Germany and was switching bombing targets to include transportation infrastructure (including trains and bridges) in addition to the increasingly devastating submarine warfare.

By the time for the rice harvest in the late fall of 1945, the US would have done sufficient damage to the transportation system and shipping to have led to mass deaths from starvation in numbers which would have put the two bombs to shame.

In addition to the arithmetic one of the most compelling arguments for dropping them comes from one of the leaders of the peace factions of the Japanese government who said they were a gift from the gods. Without them, the war would have continued.

The ultranationalists where preparing to declare martial law. They were strengthening the secret police to suppress any resistance from the already cowed civilians. While the bombing were rapidly destroying the manufacturing of new ordinance, they still had large stockpiles in bunkers in the hills and mountains surrounding Tokyo. (Been there.) It would have been a terribly ugly battle with a large loss of lives for both sides.

Quoted for emphasis.

178

Sincerly: Don’t rely on computer games (nor Hollywood movies) as information to form opinions on historical events. :slight_smile: If you’re gonna suggest alternate tactics (for the Allies to undertake), check to see if they, indeed, had not been tried.

Looking at your suggestions of blockade, it appears that you did not realise that Japan had lost 80% of it’s shipping by January of '45. cite That which remained was severly handicapped in it’s movements through lack of fuel, and Allied air dominance, so don’t let that remianing 20% mislead you into thinking it was an effective tool.

The US (submarines) could and did target civilian fishing boats (essentially for lack of better targets). Food was rationed, with priority going to the military and certain industrial workers.

In other words, we did[/d] the blockade route, and ultimately it alone did not compell surrender. The conventional firebombing tactics didn’t appear to be enough to convince the Japanese to surrender.

The Japanese military leadership remained determined to fight to the last man. I don’t believe that the “death before dishonor” credo was merely a tool used by cynical autocrats to keep the little people in line. I think that the leadership had convinced themselves that they were fighting to defend Japan’s unique culture and way of life, something they felt was worth paying almost any price to defend.

When the bombs were used, there were some in the Japanese leadership who felt that they were indeed looking at utter extermination. (That, and the Soviets smashing the Japanese Kwantung Army, probably reducing the Armies political prestige/power back in Japan.) Remember: Japan’s war plans were to capture and build a perimeter so strong, based on the assumption that the Allies would balk at paying the human price to defeat it, and come to the negotiation table. That perimeter had long since been broken, and the bombs further demonstrated that the Allies wouldn’t have to pay as steep a price in lives, now, to invade even Japan itself.

179

The Tuskegee Experiment was horriffic.

But it is in no way comparable to any of the things DrDeth mentioned. Not even close.

180

Prove it.